Alumna walks the talk as Nashville walking and biking manager

Anna Dearman uses her Lipscomb liberal arts degree every day to fuel a better future for how Music City moves.

Janel Shoun-Smith  |  05/30/2024

Each day Anna Dearman (BA ’13) strives to walk a mile in other peoples’ shoes. It’s not just a metaphor, though, it’s actually her job.

As the walking and biking manager at Nashville Department of Transportation, Dearman is thinking about (and often actually walking) Nashville’s sidewalks and bikeways every day, planning for a future with fewer pedestrian fatalities and more footprints on the pavement.

As Nashville’s only multi-modal walking and biking planner, Dearman oversees plans for the 100+ bikeway projects in development, representing over 150 miles of bikeways. Add to that Nashville’s sidewalk projects in development, and Dearman is shaping a future where Nashville’s roads are used, in her words, “more efficiently, joyfully and safely.”

Roads take up a lot of land area, explains Dearman, but society needs that space for important things like homes and public common areas. To use a city’s space most efficiently, to benefit all residents, roads need to become multi-purpose, with safe spaces for drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians all at once. 

“We’re trying to be more efficient and safer to accommodate the future growth we continue to experience without taking over the important public space,” she said. “We’re all sharing this space. So we take a data-driven approach to building projects where they are most needed by the most vulnerable, while trying to balance the political dynamics.”

Dearman’s most high-profile Nashville project to date is the protected bikeway on 12 Avenue South from Ashwood Avenue to Division Street. The bikeway is protected from the street by concrete or sod barriers and bioswales, or engineered planters that manage stormwater. The project, completed in April 2023, was the first of its kind for Nashville, a sort of proof-of-concept project for a city that has struggled with rapid, exponential growth, said Dearman.

“A lot of people were opposed at first, but they have now seen the improvement for people biking and walking along that corridor. There have been three serious injury crashes involving vulnerable road users in recent years. Since the project was constructed, there have been zero.” 

With some of the busiest sidewalks in the world in its downtown, Nashville is a city that many other urban giants are watching to see how it deals with the crowds, said Dearman. Historic buildings, commercial deliveries, tourist traffic and ride-sharing services are all factors to consider in planning sidewalks in the urban core.

Her active transportation planning work complements the work of the city’s engineers who are figuring out the best locations to install traffic calming measures such as speed cushions, plastic posts at curves and street markings among other things. Such designs are self-enforcing measures that encourage drivers to make the safest driving behavior (driving more slowly) the intuitive driving behavior, thus making the street safer for people walking, biking and rolling, said Dearman.

Dearman’s approach to city planning while balancing community concerns, was molded in a somewhat unusual way. When she arrived at Lipscomb from her home town of Kingston, Tennessee, she already knew she wanted to go into city planning. In fact, she had already done an internship for the City of Knoxville Department of Community Development. She also knew, however, that she wanted a broad, rich humanities education to inform her future career.

She found what she was looking for at Lipscomb when then-Chair of English Matt Hearn told her: “English is the study of what it means to be human.”

“And that was everything that I wanted at that time,” she said.

She did a distributed major, where she pieced together her own liberal arts education incorporating English, Bible, art history and history.

“I think it was even more useful than my planning degree was to go into a planning career,” said Dearman. “It taught me how to communicate in a way that serves other people, not just yourself, which is critical to any career. It’s a loving and respectful approach.”

During her college career, she completed a research internship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory working on their Sustainable Campus Initiative. On Lipscomb’s campus she was a student administrator in the writing studio, a student worker in the Office of Global Learning, a member of Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society and Vice President of Alpha Chi Honor Society.

Upon graduation, she entered graduate school at Portland (Oregon) State University, majoring in urban and regional planning in a city known nationwide as one of the most environmentally progressive in the country.

During her graduate education, she worked with the university’s Sustainable Neighborhoods Initiative, an innovative community-university engagement strategy, as well as working with Clean Energy Works and the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, working on an update of the city’s comprehensive plan.

“We saw the Portland region as the center of planning in North America,” Dearman said of she and her husband, a civil engineer. “It was wonderful to go there to learn and get experience in the private and the public sectors, to steep yourself in environmentalism.

“They are on the leading edge in terms of researching and experimenting with best practices for transportation planning,” she said of Portland. “They are really willing to try things,” with a focus on planning alongside the community and collaboration with other agencies.

In 2016, she received her master’s degree and moved on to work as a senior planner for WSP USA in Portland and a senior transportation planner in Vancouver, Washington, before moving back to Nashville to take up its challenges in 2021.

“Our role as planners is to see projects through from vision and idea to implementation or construction,” said Dearman. “There is a community component; we are building relationships with people and working with them on design concepts.”

And that is where her liberal arts English degree really serves her well, said Dearman.

“It’s been true for me every day of my career that the English major was an education in empathy, literally trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes, wheels or wheelchairs, trying to walk a mile in other people’s shoes is so critical to just being a human in the world,” she said.

“We are asking people to turn over power to us to shape their world,” she said of urban planners. “Our job is to facilitate other people’s power. My education at Lipscomb of how to care for and love other people, that’s our Biblical charge, and that is at the heart of my work.”